The Jewish Daughter Diaries (11 page)

Gaby Dunn

My mom is a fan of email forwards with dubious cautionary advice that Snopes.com—and any even mildly intelligent person—has already debunked. For instance, did you know that if you put your ATM password in backwards, it alerts the police that you're being robbed at gunpoint? Did you know that rapists only go after girls wearing ponytails and that women with short hair are less likely to be victims? Did you know that dialing *677 tells you if the unmarked police car trying to pull you over is actually a murderer?

You didn't? That's because none of these myths are true, but all of these tips have been heralded as life-saving advice by my mother.

Other scary emails instructed me:

1. To never get out of my car to remove a flyer from my windshield because a carjacker is waiting to get inside.

2. That hotel room keys can steal your credit card information.

Also, this isn't advice, but did you know George W. Bush makes the same face as a monkey sometimes? That was from a terrific, Mom-forwarded chain letter, too.

Recently, she came up with by far the most outlandish bit of safety advice. My mom called me and my younger sister to tell us she wanted to book us plane tickets home for December 21, 2012, because she'd heard on TV that this was the date of the end of the world. She wanted us both “home for the apocalypse.”

The plan she'd devised was to rent a helicopter way in advance and fly around until the flood waters subsided. Then, we'd float inside the helicopter until we found land or other refugees—or ran out of gas. I am not sure why she was convinced a helicopter would float. Until we were rescued, my whole family would just stick together in the cramped space, like Thanksgiving dinner for all eternity. I told her I'd rather just go out with the fiery asteroids. Thanks.

It's not that my mother isn't smart. She is one of most well-read women I know. She is, unfortunately, a winning combination of gullible and anxious. I have never known her to understand sarcasm, instead answering every burn I sent her way as a moody teenager with a sincere apology and desire to do better. The guilt I felt was insurmountable. It was a better comeback than any she could have zinged me with on the spot.

Her anxiety was a different hurdle, and it was contagious. I went along with all my mom's half-explained safety tips because I was also scared. She wanted to instill some healthy fear so I didn't walk off with a stranger.

I grew up in the same city where Adam Walsh, the six-year-old son of
America's Most Wanted
host John Walsh, was kidnapped from a local mall and murdered. It was a mall we'd visited as a family many times. After that, my mom was convinced that every stranger we saw was planning on walking off with me the minute she turned her head. Her paranoia may have sprouted, rightfully, during that time. Many mothers in our area felt the same.

And so I learned to “protect myself.”

When I was in second grade, an ice cream truck started a new route down my street. Every day, I would hear the jovial music begin as all the kids would stream out and line up to purchase ice cream. Every kid except me. My mom was convinced that “ice-cream-truck driver” was the perfect undercover job for a pedophile kidnapper.

Her other reasoning? Quote: “Gabrielle, you were just a little kid. How were you gonna know the difference between a regular ice cream truck and a pedophile in his car offering you ice cream? If I let you go to one truck, you could think you're supposed to go to all trucks.”

My mom was actually convinced I wouldn't notice that one was a big, white musical ice-cream truck and one was a guy holding a Popsicle next to a grungy El Camino.

I was never allowed to open the door for a pizza delivery man. Instead, I had to slip the money through the mail slot and tell him to leave the pizza on the welcome mat. Then, my mom instructed me to watch through the front window to make sure the delivery van pulled away before I opened the door to retrieve the pizza. I did this well into my teens. It was like a reverse
Silence
of
the
Lambs
every time we ordered Papa John's.

My mom is also extremely cleanly. My younger sister dubbed her the “white tornado” for how often she speeds through the house, picking up toys and clothing and dust in her wake. My mom is in no way comparable to Joan Crawford in
Mommy
Dearest
, but they did share one non-negotiable tip: no wire hangers. She even cleans the house before the housekeeper comes so no one will ever have seen her with a less-than-spotless home.

We never had “the talk” in a traditional sense, though we did have a discussion about the ablutions of future paramours. Her one big piece of dating advice for me as a teenager was to never date a boy with dirty fingernails. A boy who couldn't be bothered to clean his fingernails didn't care about the little things, the details, the important stuff, and would therefore make a terrible boyfriend.

“If he shows the initiative to clean his fingernails, then this boy is probably ambitious, hard-working, and conscientious,” she'd say. “He has goals. He cares about how he presents himself. He probably calls his mother once in a while.” You know who else probably cleaned his fingernails compulsively? Patrick Bateman. Sure, he had ambition. But it was murder ambition.

For someone so paranoid, my mom should have picked up on the correlation between obsessive cleanliness and sociopathy. This is, after all, the woman who forced me to keep cash in my underwear and socks in case I was ever mugged. A pickpocket could also easily steal money from my backpack or my purse without my feeling it. You know, if I had the nerve endings of a frozen pizza and the thief had the stealth of Fagin or Aladdin.

According to my mom, it's much safer to keep your money in a fanny pack or, like I mentioned above, in a pouch inside your underwear. She actually suggested an underwear pouch. I suspected that doing any of those things would surely prevent anyone from ever reaching into my underwear again.

Having paper in your shoe is, according to my mother, a good luck charm. Any time I had an exam at school, my mom would tell me to put a small piece of paper in my shoe, supposedly to help me remember what I'd studied. There's no secret mom logic behind this one. It's a trick my grandmother believed in and passed on to my mom, who passed it on to me. Somewhere along the way, I think they lost a step: maybe the step where I write the answers to the test on the paper first.

When I was three, she taught me a made-up song with my full name, address, and telephone number so that I could tell the police where I lived if I ever got lost. (I still remember the made-up song.) She brought me down to the police station to give them fingerprints and a cheek swab, just in case, and we made a home video of me stating my name, height, and age in case one needed to be given to local TV stations. Even though, according to her logic, I wouldn't know the difference between a police officer and a guy in a sailor hat holding a Popsicle.

Then, when I was about seven, my mom put me in the open trunk of my dad's car and taught me where to kick so the taillight would burst if I were ever abducted. I remember the scratchy feeling of the trunk's carpet and the sunlight in my eyes as my mom stood above me, watching my leg pretend to kick out the light. Then, she said, I could stick my hand through the hole and wave to passing cars to alert them that a kidnapped child was inside.

She'd heard about the technique in an email forward.

Wendy Liebman

Like so many other Jewish women of a certain age, I've started turning into my mother. She likes what she likes, doesn't put up with bullshit, and hates the word “asshole.” And lately, I've noticed myself slowly, reluctantly taking on these attributes as well. But I'll never wear a shower cap or become obsessed with golf. And I swear I'll never play the drums at my daughter's wedding. (Especially since I don't play the drums or have a daughter.)

• • •

I met my husband, Jeffrey, when I was thirty-eight and he was hired to write a sitcom for me. Our first meeting was at a deli in Studio City, California. The greeter said, “Where do you want to sit?” And I blurted out, “I just want to look at you!” (To Jeffrey, not the greeter.) I knew it wasn't professional—I wasn't even thinking really—the words just fell out of my mouth. Jeffrey told me later that when he saw me walk into the restaurant, his knees started to wobble and he didn't know if he would make it to the table.

It truly was love at first sight for us both. I don't think we talked about the sitcom for more than five minutes, but I moved in with him three months later, fell in love with his sons, and learned how to do laundry. Up until that point I always thought I was going to be an old maid because I was still single and approaching forty, but we got married four years after that.

My mother, Toni, fell in mother-in-law love at first sight with Jeffrey as well. I could tell, because as soon as she saw him standing at the door, she said, “Here,” and handed him a garbage bag to throw in the can outside before crossing the threshold of her life.

Really, Mom?
Not “Hello!” Or “Nice to meet you!” Or “Wendy's told us so much about you!” Or “Come in! Sit down, relax!” Or “How was your flight?” My mother, not one for small talk, just said, “Here,” and passed the Hefty bag to my Prince Charming like it was a hot potato.

It took me a while before I realized that my mother knew right away that Jeffrey was here to stay. I mean, you don't ask a stranger to take out the trash unless you have a sixth sense that soon he'll soon be doing it every week for your daughter.

Four years later, Jeffrey asked my father if he could marry me. My dad was thrilled. My mom said, “It's about fucking time.” That's not even a joke. That is what she said.

• • •

I planned my wedding like a sorority girl. I had a notebook full of info. Guest lists. Seating arrangements. Food and flowers. Hotel contacts. Rehearsal dinner plans. Directions to the lingerie store where they would make a special bra for me to wear under the gown that could've paid for the rehearsal dinner. All the papers were neatly filed and color coded, receipts and business cards attached. I wanted everything to be perfect. I cut out pictures from magazines. Hired a guy named David to coordinate the music.

After sending a blurb to the
New
York
Times
to announce our marriage (Liebman/Sherman, April 12, 2003, Pasadena, California), the editor contacted me and said the paper wanted to do a longer story. This motivated everyone to kick it up a notch. The flower guy told me he would arrange every flower himself. The people at the Ritz said it would be even ritzier. Everyone was pitching in. And I was confident that my wedding would be breathtaking.

But I was worried about one thing: that my mother would end up playing the drums. Because she loves to play the drums. And she's wicked good. It's been a family joke for years that at any given function, my mother, all five foot one of her, would inevitably find the drum set and invite herself to sit down and jam. We all know it's going to happen; it's just a question of when.

So at the rehearsal dinner I gently asked her not to play the drums at my wedding.

“Why not?” she asked curiously.

“Well…because. Well, because I'm asking you not to.” I was very adult about it. She said a cheerful, “Okay.” And that was that.

• • •

The outdoor ceremony was like a fairy tale. Jeffrey actually showed up. Just as everyone moved inside to the reception, it started to rain, which I'd heard was good luck at a Jewish wedding. The ballroom was exquisite. The food delicious. The cake divine. Surrounded by friends old and new, and family from far away, it was a room full of love and laughter, union, reunion, and celebration. (Not to mention the
New
York
Times
.)

So I'm now Wendy Ellen Liebman Sherman and it's one o'clock in the morning. I'm holding my shoes and people are saying good-bye. I feel exhilarated, overjoyed, married. I got hitched without a hitch. David comes over and tells me the band is going to play one more song before packing up. I see my mother make a beeline for the stage.

I am truly stunned. I step in her path. Very quietly I ask, “Mommy, what are you doing?”

And without missing a beat, no pun intended, as if we had never had a conversation about this exact thing the night before, she says, “I'm going to play the drums!”

My husband of five hours interrupts and says to me, “May I have this dance?”

I take a deep breath, take Jeffrey's hand, and get out of my mother's way so she can take her place with the band to do her thing.

And then I looked at my father and I saw the joy it brought him, unless he was just happy because his forty-two-year-old daughter had finally gotten married. But he was smiling ear to ear. I blew a kiss to my mother. I wasn't even hiding under the table. I was enjoying the last song of the first day of my new life.

Mireille Silcoff

I can't figure out if my mother is the first or last person with whom I should be discussing my organ donation form. It came with the renewal of my Canadian Medicare card a few weeks ago and has been sitting—questioning my fabric as a human being—on my desk ever since: will I “save lives by consenting to organ and tissue donation”?

My mom says she hasn't signed hers either. She says she hasn't signed it “just in case.”

“Just in case what, Mom?”

“I don't know. Maybe it will hurt.”

I recently read a chilling magazine story about anesthetic—how sometimes people who seem fully under are nothing of the sort. They are just externally paralyzed. On the inside, they are awake: violently flailing and screaming bloody murder, because someone is slicing them open,
and
they
can
feel
it
. I think my mother is imagining something like that.

This is not the conversation I am used to having with her about death. That old, well-rehearsed sketch is the one where she makes me swear up and down, left and right, that I will make quick work of her before I ever so much as
think
of putting her in a home for the elderly. She used to say that I should shoot her before she “gets old.” For a while, this meant sixty-five. Then when she turned sixty, the age where I reach for my revolver became seventy, and now that my mother is sixty-eight, age has been entirely replaced by the more open-ended nursing-home idea. Stewed prunes for breakfast in a teal dining room surrounded by murmuring caregivers rocking wheelchairs? My responsibility, as my mother's daughter, is to make sure she never sees it.

“And after you kill me, don't put me in a box with pink satin like I am a bonbon.”

“Okay.”

“Just a plain box. The religious, they sell them. A plain box.”

“Okay. Kill my mother. Get a plain box from the religious. Anything else?”

“Then push the box into the ocean from Frishman Beach. It has to be Frishman.”

Frishman Beach is the Tel Aviv shore my mom grew up on. I have a set of photos of her, back when she was twenty-two, then a well-known Israeli folk dancer with a ponytail that freely grazed the small of her back. She is wearing a bikini. It is the mid-sixties. She looks like
And
Then
God
Created
Israeli
Woman
. I have one of the pictures framed. Whenever anybody walks into my living room, it's the first thing they ask about.

I tell my mother it might be illegal doing anything with a corpse on Frishman beach. Too many sunbathers, ice cream eaters. The lifeguard might not like it.

“So? Do you know how many immigrants sneaked into Israel from that beach? You go at night, you push me into the ocean,
finito
.”

Please do not mistake my mother for morbid. She is in fact the opposite, so full of life that death seems like some extremely far-off, non-applicable journey—something that happens to others. In our relationship, I am the melancholic Harold to her high-kicking Maude, the limping, gloomy Igor to her effervescent professor. A few years back, I enraged her by going to New Hampshire to take a vow of silence for several days to promote a feeling of “emptiness.”

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked. “There will be plenty of time for being an empty nothing when you are dead.”

I'm not so sure. My own feelings on the afterlife flip-flop between admittedly idiotic worrying that I will need my liver and a diaphanous voile dress for entry into heaven's ball or hell's BBQ to a more rational belief that one's fate is conditional to one's disposal. If you are buried, you become earth. If you are sunk at sea, you become shark food. Then you become a shark, and then the shark poops you out, and then you become sand. Someone might as well have my kidneys.

My mom says I am being neurotic about this organ donor form, overthinking, as usual. Actually, what she really says is: “Why don't you take your slippers off already and go outside?” In the world of our exchanges, that means the same thing. The great thing about being as opinionated and yet fiercely nontheoretical as she is that the combination makes for a great accidental philosopher. While Proust can write 1,200,000 words on the past and never quite crack the nut of it, my mother eats Swann's Madeleine whole with her succinct “If it's already happened, then it's nothing anymore.”

“So what do you think happens after death?” I ask her.

“Well, I can't believe there will ever be a time when I haven't existed,” says my mother.

If you twist that one around in your head for a while, you might come to the conclusion that my tennis-nut, Zumba-dancing mom is a genius, having just created the perfect elevator pitch for every major spiritual tradition's view of mortality, from Buddhism to Islam (and all this while writing out her Costco shopping list: party pack of lamb chops, eternal continuation, blackberries, mozzarella…).

“Why don't you tell the organ donation people that you are Jewish?” asks my mother, looking up from her list. “Lots of the people I know won't even stress about this organ thing because they are Jewish.”

Some think the Bible says Jews are not supposed to be cut up after death, not even autopsied. And even though lots of modern Jewish thinking has found loopholes in that, I would love to glom on to it, if only because there is so little in straight Biblical Judaism that is good for getting you out of anything. But I just can't.

There is something I call Convenience Judaism. And for a shrimp-eater like me, not signing your organ donor form for reasons connected to ancient Jewish law reeks of it. It's much worse than taking the day off work for Yom Kippur, only to spend it watching DVDs on your computer with snacks. You answer the phone solemnly. Doesn't the caller know it's the Jewish Day of Atonement? And then you return to your HBO-and-pretzels marathon.

Before leaving for Costco, my mom tells me that if she ever did sign her organ donor form, it would be so “people can see how healthy I was.” And I will end up signing mine. Because I figure that, with all my mother's genes in me, better to become someone's liver, better to get back into life, than to become a bunch of ocean floor fertilizer—off the coast of Frishman beach or anywhere else.